Dream

Last year I went to a ten day silent meditation retreat called Vipassana. I’ve resisted writing about it until now because, well… much of my intention for the practice was to embrace the unknowable. It. Just. Was. Writing about it, saying what it was and wasn’t, seemed a betrayal of that intention.

But I’ll say this: it didn’t change me as much as it changed what I thought of as “change” and “me.” Everything is always changing–a flux field of constant creation, destruction, and transformation–and the “me” is that too. I mean, just look at the before and after:

Burns are a lot of things. They start with 10 principles. But when those principles are applied with particular time and space constraints by a self-selected group of humans, it’s difficult to say what burns ARE.

One natural result of a couple principles (namely: Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, and Participation) is that people build physical contraptions, or art, that others participate with. Cars are probably the most common form (because they’re also really useful) but people also make statues, boardwalks, mazes, gardens, sandboxes, swings, floats, slides, whatever… you name it, some crazy human has tried to build it.

Pipe was going to change how people kept in touch. Instead of sloshing through the swamps of social networks, task lists, relationship managers, and emails to figure out who to contact and when, you’d simply open Pipe. And there’d be ONE person, THE person you want to connect with… or not. If not, you tell Pipe it was wrong and why, and Pipe will learn.

I was elated to discover that this Pipe dream wasn’t a pipe dream. Pipe would come to exist, not just for me but for many others. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This post is about the life of Pipe. From conception to death… and beyond. 😉

So I want to become a front-end guru. I’ve been a .NET guy for the last 6 years or so. I used to be proud of that. Then I moved out to San Francisco.

Telling people you’re a .NET developer out here is like telling them you’re a Flash, COBOL, or punch card developer. You get those, “oh, well, you’re useless” stares.

That’s not the only reason, though. I actually believe that the majority of application software will be (if not already) written for the client-side web. Which means javascript. Even the server-side can be written in javascript now with node.js.

Fortunately, learning a new programming language is not like learning a new spoken language. Once you get a hold of a few new concepts, syntaxes, patterns, and processes, you’re well on your way to building just about anything.

This was my hello world example app for the Locker Project built with Ember.js. It was fun playing with Ember.js, getting to know states, templates, models, controllers and how those work in Ember. I felt overall that Ember wasn’t that difficult to learn but, for something as simple as this app, overly complex.

What is does

QuotePhoto pulls random images, and overlays a random quote. Sometimes the result is humorous.

If people saw meditation like riding a bike, I wonder how many would so easily submit that they couldn’t do it.

Like riding a bike, meditation is really easy to learn. Sure you can always get better at riding a bike, but that first hurdle of just being able to say I CAN ride a bike is not that difficult to get over.

A Locker is a container for personal data, which gives the owner the ability to control how it’s protected and shared. It retrieves and consolidates data from multiple sources, to create a single collection of the things you see and do online: the photos you take, the places you visit, the links you share, contact details for the people you communicate with, and much more. It also provides flexible APIs for developers to build rich applications with access to all of this information.

A Locker handles the non-trivial tasks of pulling, normalizing, de-duping, and merging personal data across multiple sources. It also makes it easy to query that cleaned-up data with a neat API.